The Brew SiteDeep Cover Brown Ale
Deep Cover Brown Ale. Left Hand Brewing. I hate to say it, but right off the bat Left Hand commits the cardinal website sin: an all-Flash site. Even worse, the front “page” of the site is an age verification check—and regular readers know how I just love those. I hate to go off on a tangent here, but having an all-Flash site is about the worst kind of web presence a brewery could have; there are no direct URLs to link to, I can’t copy and paste text at all, there’s no accessibility, it’s resource-intensive…
Okay, enough. I’ll write a Beer Hacker article soon on the subject. In the meantime, back to the beer.
It’s an English Brown Ale, very easy drinking at 4.23% alcohol by volume. It came with my Beer of the Month selection earlier in the year.
Appearance: Deep copper-brown beer with a thin and fizzy cola head that fell almost right away.
Smell: Very prominent notes of caramel and roasted brown malts. A touch of chocolate, maybe hazelnut.
Taste: Nutty and buttery, with a nice interplay of some lightly caramelized sugars and roasty, coffee-like grains. Not burnt in character at all, though—it’s much more of a roasted nut / toasted granola character. Sweet with very little hop character.
Mouthfeel: Smooth, a little syrupy though it’s lighter than medium-bodied.
Overall: Very pleasant nut brown ale—roasty without being harsh or astringent or burnt at all. Tasty.
On BeerAdvocate, it scores a grade of B. On RateBeer, it scores 2.99 out of 5, and is in their 43rd percentile.
The one thing that the Left Hand web site does give you is a sense of entertainment. The site is filled with eye candy. But yes, from a linkability and probably findability on Google, it’s not going to help itself with a Flash design. They should try giving the visitor an option much like what New Belgium did – a high graphics version and a lower tech linky version.
The beer itself was OK. Not a real stand out, especially if you are used to big taste imperials or IPAs. I used to love browns as one of my favorite styles, but since getting into so many other styles, browns seem a bit bland by nature.